THE SUGAR CANE 183 



plant — the palm, the birch, the maple, the American agave — 

 is rendered useful to man by the sugar it contains. It is this 

 substance which imparts sweetness to the honey gathered by 

 ])ees from flowers, and, after undergoing fermentation, changes 

 the juice of the grape into delicious wine. 



But although sugar is of almost universal occurrence through- 

 out the vegetable world, yet few plants contain it in such 

 abundance as to render its extraction profitable; and even the 

 beet-root requires high protective duties to be able to compete 

 with the tropical sugar-cane, a member of the extensive family 

 of the grasses, or the Gramineae, which probably spreads more 

 than twenty thousand species over the surface of the globe. 



The original home of this plant — for which, doubtless, the 

 lively fancy of the ancient Greeks, had they been better ac- 

 quainted with it, would have invented a peculiar god, as for 

 the vine or the cereals — is most likely to be sought for in 

 South-Eastern Asia, where the Chinese seem to have been the 

 first people that learnt the art to multiply it by culture, and to 

 extract the sugar from its juice. 



From China its cultivation spread westwards to India and 

 Arabia, at a time unknown to history, and the conquests of 

 Alexander the Great first made Europe acquainted with the 

 sweet-juiced cane, while sugar itself had long before been 

 imported by the Phoenicians as a rare production of the Eastern 

 world. 



At a later period, both the plant and its produce are men- 

 tioned by several classical authors. Pliny speaks of the Arabian 

 and Indian sacchaimm, which then was only used as a medicine ; 

 and a passage in Lucan's " Pharsalia " — 



" Quique bibunt tener4 dulces ab arundine succos " 



— evidently alludes to the sweet juice of the sugar-cane. 



During the dark ages which followed the fall of the Roman 

 Empire, all previous knowledge of the Oriental sugar-plant 

 became lost, until the Crusades, and, still more, the revival 

 of commerce in Venice and Genoa reopened the ancient inter- 

 course between the Eastern and the Western world. From 

 Egypt, where the cultivation of the sugar-cane had mean- 

 while been introduced, it now extended to the Morea, to 

 Rhodes, and Malta; and at the beginning of the twelfth 



